Despite Employee Perks, Google Has High Turnover

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Google has some of the best perks in the country -- free five-star food, five months of paid maternity leave, great insurance, free yoga -- but its employees only last about a year. Despite being rated one of the best companies to work for and an 84 percent satisfaction rate, its employees on average leave just after a year.

Google has been hiring a lot of new, young employees, according to Bloomberg News, which could be why PayScale.com gave the tech titan such a high turnover rate. Google has grown from 9,500 to 28,500 employees since 2007, and the median age is 29.

However, the high turnover isn't unknown in tech companies. Generation Y is supposedly a highly disloyal bunch despite the perks and high average pay. "It's a hot job market," said PayScale lead economist Katie Bardaro.

For instance, Yahoo pays an average $107,000 a year, yet the median tenure is only 2.4 years. At other companies, such as ExxonMobil, it's 6.5 years.

But, Bloomberg is quick to point out, that high median employee tenure doesn't mean success. Eastman Kodak has the most loyal employees, but it's on shaky financial ground, having already filed for bankruptcy.

Do we think Eastman Kodak's bankruptcy is proof that long-term employees are bad? No, just because one event happened before another doesn't mean it was caused by it, so that "proof" doesn't exist. Instead, we should focus on the idea that Google and the tech sector seem to take short tenure in stride. Perhaps all the perks keep employees there longer than they would normally have stayed.